


Crucible

by SpaceSealAU



Category: DreamWorks Dragons (Cartoon), How to Train Your Dragon (Movies)
Genre: Amputation, Gen, Self-Harm, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-21
Updated: 2017-10-21
Packaged: 2019-01-21 00:49:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12445719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpaceSealAU/pseuds/SpaceSealAU
Summary: What makes a runt into a hero?  Musing alone in his cabin, Viggo comes upon the answer.





	Crucible

**Author's Note:**

> Anyone here like the film 'Monster in a Box?' Viggo reminds me of Spalding Gray.

What did he have?

  
What did he HAVE?

  
Viggo’s fingers splayed across the scattered pages of his folio, smearing diagrams and doodles across the work bench. Disorganized and uncatalogued the careful sketch of a propeller housing flitted across the anatomical diagrams of a Scauldron’s throat (the page had one bloody thumbprint near the bottom) and a wasted page full of tiny ink spirals packed close together.

  
He flicked his hand and the top layer of pages fluttered away, landing haphazardly across the stone floor, revealing the bundle of sketches from Lars III’s dissection.

  
What he had was 34 years of nothing. Seas of sketches and diagrams littered through all corners of the archipelago, three hundred books he’d read and lost, prototypes abandoned on strange beaches and a mysterious stain on his tunic that he couldn’t get out.

  
Hiccup had a dragon.

 

Viggo had a hundred dragons, every dragon he had seen, some broken in pens and some reduced to component parts for sale. He had known them intimately in every sinew and artery and fold, and yet he had nothing.

  
It meant nothing.

  
Hiccup was the son of a chief. His position and status had been handed to him as his birthright, where Viggo had been forced to be clever, proving himself over and over to be more than a runt, more than Ryker’s strange younger brother, and yet the dragon riders had the loyalty.

  
Viggo flicked his hand again, and the sketches of Lars’ abdominal cavity scattered out, disappearing under the cabinets across the way. The forge was silent and cold, and his workshop was lit only by the oil lantern he’d hung from the crossbeams. Its light flickered and swayed softly, never quite looking completely real.

  
Thirty four years of sacrifice and risk. Thirty four years blazing like a shooting star, trying to burn himself out, trying to prove he was worth something, and the boy simply appeared on the scene and set it all to ruin.

  
Profit mattered. Monstrous nightmare gel for lanterns mattered. Gronkle iron axe heads and ploughs and shields mattered, quaken for the quarries mattered, hides for clothes and boots and armor mattered. The tons of cured meat. There was no soil to farm in half the archipelago, and he was unsure the boy had any comprehension how many hungry mouths existed outside his little island home.

  
What refinery made one runt into the hero and the other the struggling capitalist?

  
The boy was fantastic, a creature slapped together by escapist daydreams and young girls’ fancy, a being so clean and pure he didn’t mesh with the unfortunate world of blight and blood and ruined old men.

  
His exploits were adventurous, bold, daring in the way a child dares. The boy tamed a dragon and began a noble, clueless quest to save an animal and doom a race.

  
Viggo had learned to tame a dragon, and began the endless, hopeless slog to pay his mother’s debts, make a name for himself, prove he was worth something.

  
He wondered if it would have mattered if he’d had a noble mission. Where can nobility stand against the debt collector? Between the poorhouse and the hunting ship he hadn’t had a choice, just as Ryker hadn’t, or his men, or Lars before that speedstinger got the top of his head off.

  
The boy had no dependents. The boy had no debts. The boy had only a feeling in his heart and the belief that the worst was behind him.

  
(“How shall I do it?” she’d whispered. It had been summer, the clear blue sky stretching endlessly outside her bedroom window. Viggo, a young man at 11 and so very small, had stared at her with incomprehension, wrapping his fingers around her cold, pale hand. His mother swallowed, the unceasing flow of tears down her cheeks still going. “You’ve read your father’s books. How shall I do it?” She pulled his hand to her chest, pressing his fingers to her heart. “Could I do it with the kitchen knife? Would it be quick?”)

  
There was no crucible in grief. Poured into it he had been a child, scared and hiccoughing as Ryker did all the hard things. Twenty years later and Ryker still was, following his brother and keeping him safe, just like Mum had told him to do.

  
Viggo was nothing. Building an empire was meaningless if you can’t maintain it, and here he was Ozymandias, with shrinking maps and shrinking profits. Look upon his works, ye mighty, and despair.

  
What makes a runt into a hero? What made his scars intriguing instead of merely appalling, his story an adventure instead of minutia? Viggo sat heavily down on the chair in front of his workbench, turning and stretching his legs out, putting them up on the edge of the counter.

  
Hiccup had, at a young age, faced his worst fear, and been ripped apart by it. And here he was, new and perfect. He could sell the boy, he was so squeaky and marketable.

  
The boy’s crucible had been a neat, self contained story. He had tried to prove himself, only to discover a depth of spirit no one had predicted, and he changed the world with his discovery.

  
Suffering came in so many colors. Every man had a story to break your heart, but only a few created anything worthwhile out of them. It seemed more often that suffering merely broke you down, turned potential into waste. He could have been something, true, but so could anyone. Ryker’s story was no less heart rending.

  
Viggo ran his palms down his thighs, fanning his fingers out over his knees. The boy had never suffered another loss. Somehow, with nothing but the confidence of a neophyte, he blew away what Viggo had worked and suffered for for so long.

  
He wondered what it would be like to know his loss was behind him.

  
One day Hiccup would lose the girl, or his friends, or his father, and he would be ruined, but the blissful part of the boy’s story was that he had no idea. He stood in a clearing between loss and grief, and for just a moment he was free of either.

  
Viggo hated him. And envied him.

  
What made the runt a hero?

  
Viggo had once amputated the arm of one of his shipmates. The man had gotten his wrist tangled in the lines of the harpoon, and when they launched it the man just started screaming, something wet like hot sea spray spattering across Viggo’s face. Bone and muscle had flapped as he threw himself to the deck, screaming and trying to get ahold of the soft ruin of his arm..

  
Unable to stop in the middle of the hunt, men had moved over and around him, hauling in the dragon. Viggo had blocked him from trampling, tying his belt high up on the man’s arm and fumbling through the bloody strips for the artery. Unlike in his father’s medical texts the different parts of the body were not neatly color coded for reference, and by the time he’d stopped the bleeding, cut away the ruined pieces and closed the skin up over the wound the man was long dead.

  
He’d seen successful amputations. The dragon hunters had pressed him in with the ship’s surgeon, when he was first signed on to sail with them, unimpressed by his slim frame but hoping the fact their father had been a doctor might matter for something. Viggo had spent almost a year scrubbing surgical equipment and throwing rotten limbs overboard. He ran his fingers around the top of his boot absently.

  
On that operating table the worth of men was measured. All of them screamed, many cried and begged, but all of that was merely part of the experience. Strong men broke, with the saw in their bone. Viggo had watched them all, and seen the hollow look where everything that was meaningless had been burned away, and only the core was left. For some, that left very little.

  
(He had only left her overnight. With Ryker already before the mast, it left only him and her, and the great hollow rooms where their father hadn’t been for six years. She’d sat and sewn by the fire, silver needle flashing and eyes red and vacant, and he’d sit across from her, reading the same book over again and absorbing nothing. One night he’d camped on the bluffs, desperate for a break from her constant, unending misery, wanting to look up at the northern lights and feel alone in the world. When he’d come back the next morning, he was.)

  
The steel surface of the worktable glittered in the lantern light, scrubbed clean almost obsessively between projects. He liked his work surfaces to be so clean you could perform surgery off them.

  
What made a runt the hero of his story?

  
Viggo’s fingers crept towards the top drawer, slowly pulling it out with the soft sound of metal sliding against metal. Inside a silver tray lay covered with a white cloth. He caught a corner with his finger and pulled it away. Underneath were steel scalpels, clamps, and sawblades. He lifted the tray, setting it down carefully on the surface of the work bench, metal clattering gently. With one finger he pushed the drawer back closed, and sat staring at the metal tray, and its glittering silver blades.

  
After a long moment he began to unlace his boot. It fell to the floor with a thud and he threw the sock after it, slowly rolling up the cuff of his pantleg, revealing pale, wire haired skin. Exposed below the knee he ran his palm slowly up the line of his shin, watching the skin prickle and bristle against the cool air.  
He reached for the tray.

\----

“Ryker?”

  
The elder Grimborn paused, hand hovering near the handle of the door. There was the faintest smell coming from behind it, something that felt like the color red streaking across the sky. He lightly touched the door again, fingers not quite closing on the handle.

  
“Viggo?” he called cautiously. “Everything alright?”

  
One of the men had reported hearing strange noises. He would have told him to mind his own business but it was not a nervous man who had come to him, certainly not one who would mistake sounds of…private activity…for something more serious. Still, having gone through puberty in the same house together, he was not exactly willing to barge in to Viggo’s room without some kind of proof there was a problem.

  
He heard something move inside the room. When Viggo spoke his voice was shaking, a clear effort put forth to sound calm, but Ryker could identify the fear. “I may require your assistance.”

  
Ryker gripped the handle, turned it, and pulled.

  
The smell that rolled out of his brother’s room was thick and cloying, and moreso intimately familiar. Ryker’s pulse quickened and he pushed into the room, hand going automatically for the knife at his belt, but there was no enemy to fight.

  
Viggo was sitting upright on his workbench. In the poor light for a moment it looked like he was sitting on a blanket like for a picnic, hands propping him up behind him and legs sprawled out in front, barefoot, the position childlike and strange. Then he saw that the worktable was not covered in a blanket, but instead with smears of blood, which covered Viggo’s pants and arms, a smear of it brushed across his forehead.

  
Viggo, skin pale and drenched with sweat, offered a shaky, wan smile. In his hand was a small silver bone saw. Whatever he was working on was not in evidence.

  
“Ryker, I seem to require your assistance.” Viggo panted, voice trembling despite his efforts. He sounded relieved as he held the saw out towards Ryker. “I can’t seem to get the right angle.”

  
Light scattered off the bloody saw as it trembled, barely gripped by Viggo’s shaking hands. Below the saw he saw Viggo’s bare feet, one pink and trembling, the other pale, immobile against the bench.

  
“What did you do?” Ryker whispered, forcing himself to move slowly as he approached his brother. Viggo dropped the saw on the table but offered that same strange smile, like a dog trying to avoid a beating.

  
“I’ve cut through the muscle.” Viggo managed, swallowing and running a hand down the length of his shin as though to smooth it. The motion pulled the gash open, the skin below Viggo’s knee gaping, though the view was obscured by blood. “I did not anticipate the…difficulty in cutting through one’s own bone at this angle. If you would be so kind as to get the rest.”

  
Ryker batted the surgical tray off the table, tools spraying into the room to crash into cabinets and stone, and grabbed Viggo’s knee, pinning it still while he quickly tried to staunch the bleeding. Viggo had tied his belt tightly around his thigh, tourniquet the limb, but below the pants leg his skin was separated into two sections, the warm skin above the cut and cool skin below it. When he tried to press his fingers over the wound to stop what bleeding there was his pinky slipped into the gash, drawing in inhuman sound from his brother’s throat. The wound was deep, and circled the leg completely.

  
“We’ll pull into port.” Ryker said quickly, grabbing one of the once white surgical towels and wrapping it around the wound. “There’s gotta be a doctor, we’ll get you to one.”

  
Viggo shook his head, looking almost serene compared to the terror flashing across Ryker’s features. “No need, brother. There is nothing that can be reattatched. I need you to cut through the bone and finish the procedure.”

  
“Viggo, it’s your fucking leg!” Ryker shouted, “I’m not cutting off your fucking leg, you’re crazy!”

  
“The go get someone else!” Viggo shouted back, voice shaking with fear and stress.

  
For a long moment the brothers stared at each other. Eventually Ryker swallowed and looked down at the ruined leg. Dead tissue didn’t come back, no matter if it was self inflicted.

  
“H-how do I do it?” he asked, trying to keep his voice even. This was worse than the time he’d caught Viggo cutting his fingernails out deep past the quick because they ‘were dirty’.

  
Viggo’s hands moved quickly, picking up the saw again and pressing its sticky handle into Ryker’s palm. Ryker grimaced at it but gripped it, catching the grateful flash across Viggo’s face.

  
“Most of the work is done.” Viggo panted, voice oddly even. “Put it…put it in the cut. Saw. That’s all.”

  
Hands trembling a little Ryker touched the teeth of the saw to the mouth of the cut, every fiber in his being screaming at him not to press it down into his brother’s leg. After a long moment he heard Viggo whine his name, a terrified, childish sound, and he forced it down in to the wound. The breathy sound that came from Viggo, a trembling gasp as he tilted his face up to the ceiling, would have been obscene in any other context.

  
The saw teeth met something solid. He glanced up and Viggo nodded, eyelids fluttering and throat working. Ryker knew his brother didn’t pray.

  
He began to saw before he ran out of nerve.

  
Viggo gave a horrible open mouthed sound and thumped back onto his elbows, head falling back and mouth pulling open into a trembling, bluish O. The saw rattled as it chewed its way slowly through the bone, each tooth cutting in anew and Viggo’s body shuddering and shaking like a puppet.

  
Suddenly the resistance was over, and Ryker felt the familiar feel of a saw cutting into muscle, saw Viggo jerk and shudder a little. He pulled it out quickly, dropping the saw on the table and pressing a bloody, wide hand to Viggo’s face. Viggo offered a shaking smile, eyes half shut and skin nearly white, hitched, and vomited. It splattered across his tunic and pooled around his neck, his eyelids fluttering.

  
Ryker turned his face towards the door, bellowing for someone to get in here. Viggo only smiled, laying back in his own fluids. He looked more peaceful that Ryker had seen him in years.

  
(Her hands had been cold as they pressed against his face, a small woman in a threadbare shawl, standing on the dock in her house shoes. Behind him the dragon hunter vessel loomed in dock, the leviathan about to carry her oldest son away. Her eyes had been red from crying, but Ryker knew it wasn’t for him.

  
“I’ll get it, ma.” He’d said, young enough to think debts were simple and mothers were immortal. “Three weeks, then I’m back with the money. It’ll be okay.”

  
She’d smiled. It was a wet, unhappy smile, the best he’d ever been able to get from her. Her hands fell away from his face and she stepped back, movements slow and tired, like she’d run out of strength. It was only for three weeks. Three weeks and they could keep the house. Three weeks and he could buy her whatever it took to make her smile, maybe even buy a few books for Viggo to keep him occupied. Three weeks was enough time, when he was 14.

  
She’d stood on the dock and watched the ship as it departed, not returning the gesture when Ryker waved to her from the rail of the ship. Three weeks later, with only pennies in his pocket and a new scar, only Viggo and the tax collector were waiting for him.

  
Once, years later, he’d heard a woman singing in port as she hung her laundry out on the line. He’d stopped to watch as her wrinkled hands smoothed each sheet, stretching them in the sun as she sang softly to herself. Her voice had floated over the golden summer buzz like a butterfly. It was almost an hour later that he’d realized he was crying.)

  
Viggo’s hand, weak and shaking, caught ahold of Ryker’s wrist, grounding him.

  
“I’m gonna be the hero this time.” He heard his brother whisper, diction slipping. As he stared the smile faltered, and Viggo’s hand fell away, landing wetly on the table.

  
“What?” Ryker asked, voice a little high.

  
Viggo’s mouth worked. The door opened, and three men with weapons drawn burst in, looking around for the danger. They froze, staring at the table in mute horror.

  
“Well don’t just stand there!” Ryker shouted, years of practice the only thing keeping his voice from slipping into that same frightened childish register as Viggo’s. “Get over here an help me!”

  
The men stood dumbly looking at each other, swords lowering uncertainly. One of them seemed to lose whatever unspoken game of ‘not it’ they’d been playing and slid his sword back in its sheath, walking warily towards the brothers. He looked at Ryker’s hands, able to snap a speedstinger’s neck but unable to dismember his brother, hovering uselessly and shaking. He grabbed the severed leg instead, pulling it away to slop onto the floor, and he saw Viggo’s red rimmed eyes watching as part of his body moved away and out of sight.

Something like triumph flickered across them.

  
“V-viggo, you gotta tell us what to do.” Ryker insisted shakily, voice hot and desperate.

  
Viggo looked up at him hazily, offering a conciliatory smile that somehow frightened him more than if Viggo had been panicking. He knew how to handle Viggo when he was scared. If Viggo would cry he was sure he would know what to do, but he looked so sure of himself, and so calm now.

  
“Don’t worry.” Viggo said, the soothing words a rasp through a dry throat. He reached up shakily to press a cold hand to Ryker’s face, his skin tacky with blood. The wet smile made Ryker’s heart drop. When the hand fell away he grabbed Viggo by the front of his tunic, shaking him roughly and shouting his name, but Viggo flopped limply like a ragdoll, eyes half closed and showing only the whites.

(Memories became untrustworthy, in the hazy places in his heart where Ryker stored his youth. He thought he could remember her, her hair still sleek and dark then, holding his little brother in her long pale arms. He remembered it from an adult height, the lace on the edge of her nightgown frayed and filled with gaps, but still the most beautiful thing he had seen. In his memory the sun was gentle and golden, as it always was in his mind, and she sang to him, rocking her youngest son and looking down at him with beatific love.

When he'd come back to port that day, watching the cobblestones in shame and jingling the paltry coins in his pocket, Viggo had been sitting on the steps to greet him. At 13 he looked much younger, face hung and eyes wide in an expression of exquisite helplessness. As his little brother stared up at him from the steps , knees drawn up childishly to his chest, he smelled an odor that would forever drive the memory of his mother's perfume from his mind.

Viggo had left her there in the bed where he found her, and waited on the steps for three days until his ship came in, waiting for his big brother to come and make it all better.

Ryker had been trying for twenty years.)


End file.
